Do we really need money to live? Twelve years ago, Daniel Suelo decided to find out. But his life story is not so much about how he lives without money as the personal and political reasons why.
In one sense, the answer to the question is a no-brainer. There are lots of people who survive on little or no money — some of our Real Change vendors are among them. The real question is how to feel good about it.
Suelo definitely feels good about it. He’s found a way to be happy without an income and without being an undue burden on anyone; he feels he is showing people a way to escape the money system that he believes is an illusion; and, most importantly, he reached the point of giving up money after finding that his life was otherwise unmanageable.
It’s actually this last point that makes the first half of the book compelling. In his youth, the fundamentalist Christian beliefs that Suelo grew up with were rocked by his exposure to other religions and other variants of Christianity in college; then by his exposure to developing world poverty; and then by his realization that he was gay.
For some young men, such realizations might have meant backing away from religion and becoming politically active. For Suelo, it precipitated a personal and family crisis that peaked when he deliberately drove his car off a cliff.
Suelo survived, which convinced him that God had saved him for a reason.
Author Mark Sundeen, who became his friend later on, portrays this event as Suelo’s moment of truth, when he started on the road that eventually led him to give up money. Up to this point, the narration keeps a critical remove. Afterward, Sundeen loses some of his distance as he works to give Suelo’s life history a more global, spiritual and political importance. “The term for such a tale … is myth,” he writes, as he casts Suelo as a hero on a mythic journey, as if he were a character described in Joseph Campbell’s non-fiction work, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”
However, Suelo’s story is novelistic rather than mythic. After his suicide attempt, he tried a number of different ways to lead a meaningful life in a system that puts a price on everything: traveling to India and becoming disillusioned by sacred beggars; trusting that God would provide for him during a disastrous trek in the Alaska wilderness; having a brief, intense romance; and finding dystopia rather than utopia in a commune. After all this, the reader can understand his decision to live in a cave in the Utah desert near a town with ample opportunities for Dumpster diving and the certain social cachet to “camping out.” But if there’s an archetype that corresponds to his journey, it would be more the holy fool than the mythic hero.
Suelo has made a career and a philosophy of his choice. He spends considerable time blogging (zerocurrency.blogspot.com) from a free computer at the Moab Public Library. This is fine; we need voices telling us that we don’t require the material goods that make up American life and that being homeless and without money can be a means to spiritual development.
What makes this work for Suelo is a community around him embedded in the larger, money economy. He has friends and family whom he visits and gets help from when he needs it. Still, Suelo has made non-material sacrifices: He will probably never have a life partner; he will probably never have children; and he hopes that he will die before he gets too old to maintain his strenuous physical existence.
Suelo limits his use of private resources to those that are discarded or freely given, and he restricts his use of public resources to those that are available to all: He refuses food stamps, for example, but freely avails himself of the public library. He refutes the charge of not giving back by volunteering extensively. However, camping on public land, while it appears to be free, is actually predicated on continuing efforts of other people to keep corporations or individuals from appropriating those lands for their own uses. The public library exists because people vote to tax themselves — it only appears to be free.
My guess is that there is only room for a few individuals like this in any community. Furthermore, it takes a particular personality to maintain self-esteem in a society that constantly denigrates the poor. Seeing his model, the result should not necessarily be to go camp in the desert; Suelo himself agrees: “I don’t expect everybody to live in a cave and Dumpster-dive. … I do implore everybody to take only what they … need, and give up excess to those who have less than they need.”
More than that, we need to go a step further and figure out how to build a society that values community and giving rather than greed.